Beneath the Stain - Part 5 Read Online Free Page A

God. Mackey loved this girl. “Yeah,” he said, nodding and smiling. “But the folks I love best don’t give a fuck.”
    “You don’t treat me like I’m stupid, I might not give a fuck either,” she said, smiling back a little, like she was amused to find herself talking to him like this.
    “I can do that. Anything else?”
    She wrinkled her nose. “Stop putting the mics in your mouth. That primal scream thing you do sounds real fucking spiffy on your CD, but we don’t got the equipment for it here. I mean, I know they make equipment that’ll take that, but this shit is gonna short out, zap your brain through your skull, and fucking kill you!” She nodded earnestly with that, and he almost wept.
    He’d been waiting for this kid his entire fucking life.
    “Heard and understood,” he said, staring. “ Debra ! Did you hear that?”
    “Yeah, Mackey,” she said, bustling up to the stage. Trav hadn’t seen their touring equipment yet, the amps and such they needed to project in a large venue—this was supposed to be a trial run, and Mackey wondered sadly if this hadn’t been one of the things Gerry had let slide.
    “You make sure Trav gets a list of shit goin’ on here. I wasn’t in a great place the last time we had this shit out—looks like a lot of it is sort of fucked-up. I’m gonna run through the playlist with the guys and the light effects with….” Mackey looked around for Lester and Keith, the two guys Gerry had hired to do effects. Again, Mackey knew their names, they warned him when something cool was coming up, and that was about it, and while Mackey had a whole list of shit he’d wanted to change and work up in the month after Christmas and before the tour, right now they were just running through the songs in public. Maybe. “Where in the fuck are my light and sound engineers?”
    He looked at Briony like maybe she had the answer, and from the way she blushed and looked away, maybe she did have the answer but just didn’t want to tell Mackey .
    “They’re either fucking each other or doing blow,” he said flatly. They’d been a little twitchy, but then, people got twitchy around Mackey when he was trying to set up a show. He had no idea why.
    “Or getting blown and doing fuck,” Briony said with a grimace. “But yeah. You started ranting and they took off.”
    Mackey took ten deep breaths, closed his eyes, and pictured his room. Not Trav’s room, where all the sex and magic happened, but his room, where he’d been sleeping since Trav had been gone. When he was alone, he curled up in the dark space between the beds, crumpled into a little ball, where all he could feel was the peace and the music in his own head. He took ten deep breaths in that space, then ten more, and when he opened his eyes, Briony and Debra were looking at him patiently, and he thought maybe he could take homicide off the table for today.
    “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said with exaggerated patience. “We’re gonna bump ourselves up in the rotation. The guys before us have pretty spiffy lights and sound. Right now we couldn’t find our asses with both hands and a forklift in that department—we don’t want to let the audience down. We’re going to do the first number absolutely bare. All the lights— all the fucking lights— and we’re gonna come ripping out of the fuckin’ gate with ‘Tattoo’ and destroy them, does everybody got me?”
    He looked around to the band, who were hanging on to his every word and trying not to look lost. It had been a while for them too, he realized, and they missed Trav as well. Gerry hadn’t made it to every performance—or even half of them—but Trav had been so good about easing all the fucking details, they hadn’t even missed him until he was gone.
    “Good. And then after that we’re going dark and romantic—Briony, do you know the light and the sound board?”
    “Not that well, boss,” she said apologetically, and he loved her even more for